Hardware

… the company needs to be careful to pick components that are supported well upstream. What would be ideal is if Dell started encouraging its hardware suppliers to open their drivers and merge them into the mainline kernel tree. That would be infinitely more constructive for advancing desktop Linux than any preinstallation scheme.

Anti-Trust

Robbins Geller Rudman & Dowd … filed a class action suit against Finnish mobile giant Nokia yesterday claiming that the company made false and/or misleading statements to investors after it indicated that it believed the switch to the Windows Phone operating system “would reverse Nokia’s trends worldwide and dramatically improve its share of the U.S. market,” [but knew] that such a turnaround wouldn’t happen; the new Lumia 900 LTE model was glitchy and poorly accepted and its migration “not going as well as represented,” according to the complaint.

“Windows RT will have two environments, a Windows Classic environment and a Metro environment for apps. However, Windows on ARM prohibits any browser except for Internet Explorer from running in the privileged ‘Windows Classic’ environment.

Were it grounded in reality, Oracle’s claim that copyright law gives them proprietary control over any software that uses a particular functional API would be terrible for free software and programmers everywhere. It is an unethical and greedy interpretation created with the express purpose of subjugating as many computer users as possible, and is particularly bad in this context because it comes at a time when the sun has barely set on the free software community’s celebration of Java as a language newly suitable for use in the free world. Fortunately, the claim is not yet reality, and we hope Judge Alsup will keep it that way.

PR/AstroTurf/Lobbying

The nakedness of the class bias in this case, however, was especially jarring: the size and significance of the protests were downplayed, reports of police brutality were largely ignored, and the movement was portrayed as violent and dangerous. Many of the most prominent US news outlets, such as The New York Times, practically ignored the protests altogether. These shameful distortions by the corporate press display the function of the media as an organ of the rule of “the 1 percent,” and reveal how threatened elites are by organized, direct action and democratic participation.

Internet/Net Neutrality

Digital Handcuffs

Jason Pontin, editor of MIT’s Tech Review, explains why his magazine deprecated its iPad app and went to “a simple RSS feed in a river of news,” and why it’s moving to “HTML5, so that a reader will see Web pages optimized for any device, whether a desktop or laptop computer, a tablet, or a smart phone.

This is a ridiculous escalation of rhetoric by scores of Orwellian US agencies. What else can we expect from groups with such unblushingly fascist emblems and an idiotic motto like, “Protection is our Trademark.”

Intellectual Monopolies

Microsoft’s years of bullying smaller companies into patent submission is about to come back and bite them in the butt. Today in court Google demanded $4 billion a year in patent fees for the Xbox 360 or stop selling it in the United States. … Google recently purchased Motorola Mobility for $12.5 billion in what a lot of analysts saw as a means for Google to go after Microsoft in retaliation for the shady business practices Microsoft has been guilty of for years.

This counter attack is defensive. Rather than validating the patent system, it shows how wasteful it is. I’m looking forward to a string of such lawsuits against every product Microsoft has.

Back in 2006, we noted that what remained of SGI had indicated that it planned to resurrect the company by going patent troll. However, we thought we’d avoided that ignoble result when SGI sold most of its assets to Rackable for a mere $25 million three years ago. Silly us for assuming those patents would just go away.
While Rackable changed its name to Silicon Graphics International… the original company actually retained the patents, and renamed itself Graphics Properties Holdings … In the last year alone it has sued Apple, HTC, LG, RIM, Samsung, Sony, Acer, ASUS, Panasonic, Sharp, Toshiba, Vizio and Motorola Mobility.

Copyrights

under current copyright law [1978], content creators can “terminate” the assignment of their copyright after 35 years and regain the copyright. This is a right that cannot be negotiated away or given to anyone but direct heirs … The judge in the case has pretty decisively ruled against the publishers and said that partial copyright owners still can exercise their termination rights…

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Microsoft's charm offensives against Free/libre software are proving to be rather effective, despite them involving a gross distortion of facts and exploitation of corruptible elements in the corporate media

A British MEP criticises Battistelli and the management of the European Patent Office (EPO) while Baroness Lucy Neville-Rolfe, UK Minister for Intellectual Property, gets closer to Battistelli in a tactless effort to improve relations